Michael Jawer, overwhelmingly the book's formulator, no doubt with considerable counterpoint from Dr. Micozzi, describes himself as a novice (458), a regular guy not especially sensitive (234). He once represented office building owners and managers with the Environmental Protection Agency concerning people's relative comfort and productivity. How does this connect with the author's thesis that certain people experience special sensitivity to "paranormal" occurrences? Symptoms allied with sick-building air quality may move beyond the apparently physiological to a person's social-psychological interactions resulting in the label of inveterate complainer or emotionally disturbed person, followed by a sense of isolation and despond.

Among wide-ranging topics the reader may explore are these:

-- how neuroscientists view the brain as independent of and superior to the body

-- Jawer's view of affect and sentience as equal partners with the brain

-- that emotions/feelings are words for distinct aspects of emotive survival

-- that feelings are specific to situations, e. g., crying and laughter

A reasonably satisfactory bibliography with endnotes that additionally list periodical literature and sites enables the reader to push topics further.

As often the case a final chapter [13]/epilogue is a good place to start, if not followed by the previous one, to get a prospective overview deepened by reading from the beginning. Early (26-9), after a questionably useful distinction between emotion as general and feeling as situational, Jawer gathers the most important conceptual summary of the book on the functions of emotion, moving from the cultural/ecological through the social-psychological to the humanistically intrapsychic. Conversational and suggestive rather than scholarly and didactic, the style is accessible to the general reader, especially since he provides many specific illustrative examples.

Jawer is inclined to make or quote some internally inconsistent statements. To his credit he opposes the view that brain triggers emotion (450) so that despite the purely nominal distinction between brain and body he turns out to be an interactionist. At times he seems to support the view that today's neuroscience is the latest version of phrenology, with the bumps read from the inside, attributed by fiat to other unconnected intrapsychic phenomena.

Additionally, he constructs a few infelicities: a confusion (455) of psyche and psychic, an analogy with electric circuits widely misapplied to human physiology (50, 451), equation of mystical and out-of-body experience (422-3) or the apparitional and extrasensory (6), typical discussion of right versus left brain without the equivalent relation of front versus rear (128-9). Trivial inadequacies of indexing, not likely the author's job, exist, such as acronyms, like CFS (295), left unexplained.

For those readers who would feel put off -- as I was initially -- by his interest in the spooky, Jawer provides the best conclusions for a review:

In the end perhaps the skeptic, anomalist, and just plain Joe and Jane can agree that "there is no paranormal or supernatural; there are only the normal and the natural -- and mysteries yet to be explained." (434)

So, neither do I side with those suggesting that mystical or transcendent experiences point humanity toward grand new vistas, nor with those who conclude, on the other side of the spectrum, that the paranormal "tells us nothing about consciousness."

A.P. Bober has studied a psychology spanning Skinner and a humanistic-clinical view based on existential phenomenology and had been a PhD candidate in a substantive yet philosophic European-based sociology including the "critical" view. His teaching augmented courses in group theory/"small-group developmental dynamics" (lab) while introducing "sociology of knowledge" and "issues in biological anthropology," with publications in the first two fields. Currently he is writing a book on mystical experience as metaphorically tied to neuroendocrinology.

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